There was a Nevenson/Nevinson family in early Boston. They may have been related to Rev. Stone or his wife. It looks like Elizabeth's maiden name was Swift, but could be related to the Nevinsons in another way. Alternatively, Rev. Stone may have named his son after a Harvard friend or colleague in the tradition of the mix-and-match Tufts/Mather/Cotton naming scheme.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

I find this stone puzzling because there seems to be a disconnect between the borders and the lettering. The letters are much more straight and rigid than the fluid lines of the borders, and borders appear to be of a much older design than the stated date. The iconography looks very much like the carving coming out of the Lamson shop in the 1710s.

Friday, June 18, 2010

In 1721, a virulent smallpox epidemic ravaged the city of Boston. Between April and December, 5,889 Bostonians contracted the disease and 844 died of it. The danger peaked in October, with 411 deaths.

The 1721 epidemic is most often remembered for sparking a controversy over inoculation. Most Bostonians agreed with Dr. William Douglass that inoculation was a dangerous innovation that threatened to spread disease and kill hundreds.* A few prominent citizens, including Cotton Mather and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, supported inoculation based on information gathered from slaves (particularly Onesimus, a slave owned by Mather) who had undergone the procedure in Africa and from the Royal Society of London (which, in turn, got much of its information from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's female informants in Turkey). For a wonderful narrative treatment of this controversy, see Jennifer Lee Carrell's The Speckled Monster.

For me, one of the most interesting things about the 1721 epidemic is that the records it generated allow us to get a glimpse of how white and black Bostonians interacted in the context of illness and death. Onesimus' pivotal role in convincing white elites to adopt African medical knowledge is well documented, but it is far from the only instance of confrontation/collaboration between free and enslaved Bostonians during the crisis.

Samuel Sewall's diary provides a window into the events of that deadly autumn. The diary does not usually pay much attention to the comings and goings of slaves, but in September and October of 1721, they are unusually conspicuous. On September 16, Sewall noted that Jane Hirst had been brought home from her boarding house when she fell ill, and that "Boston carried her in his arms." When she was moved to another house on October 15, "Scipio carried a Note for Thanks." Five days later, Sewall attended a quintuple-funeral at the "South-Burying place" (later Granary Burying Ground), where he and his well-heeled acquaintances "met a Niger funeral."

With so many deaths, it is unsurprising that Sewall's burial party should have encountered another at the burying ground. I find this short entry very suggestive — a cadre of elite, white Bostonians burying five of their dead comes face to face with a group of their black neighbors in a space that is shared by both, yet their rituals are separate. Did the two funeral parties regard one another with hostility? Respect? Indifference? How did they feel about sharing the space of the graveyard? How did they judge each other's performance?

*It should be noted that these fears were not without merit. As Elizabeth Fenn has noted, wealthy citizens were much more likely to choose/afford inoculation than their poorer neighbors. Those who underwent the procedure (including Abigail Adams in 1775) saw no need to quarantine themselves, despite the fact that they were contagious and posed a very real danger to the non-immune public. According to Fenn, variolation "was really as likely to start an epidemic as it was to stop one, unless it was administered under a very strict quarantine."

Over the first decade of the 18th century, the town of Windham, CT was divided into several towns, a process which involved repeated surveys of the land and placement of boundary markers. The town meeting minutes are full of delightful surveying reports on town boundaries (a tear in the paper has destroyed a few words at the beginning):

as followeth beginning att a white oak neer . . . the mouth of hop river and running . . . thenc neer southeast and by south to an oak stump marked . . . stons Layed against it standing on the top of the first high hill and from thenc the same corse to a whit oak marked and stons Layed against it standing on the southernmost high roks Lying against the upper end of the falls and from thenc to a heap of stons neer walnut tree marked on the northeast end of a hill by the vilage of windhm & from thenc to a heap of stons upon the top of bare hill on the south end of waguebatuck and from thenc to a wt oak tree that is the northeast Corner of deacon Hues & Mr Clark which stand in Low Land on the west sad of John Wests meado and from then to a heap of stons neer petter prats meado which we supose to be the bound mark in norwich Line

It would be impossible to walk these boundaries today, given that only a few of the landmarks endure, but the 18th-century inhabitants found the description satisfactory. There are several similar reports in the town meeting records for this decade.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Birth Records, Windham, CT (Pic taken before I asked about pic policy, which disallows all photography, even without flash, but allows scanning, so who the heck knows. Even Harvard will let you photograph manuscripts w/o flash.)

I went home for a few days this week to attend my youngest brother's high school graduation (congrats, Wheeler!). While there, I stopped in at town hall to see if the town had any records relating to the Windham Center burying ground. It took a little while to find exactly what I was looking for, but I was not disappointed.

Windham, Connecticut was formally incorporated in 1692, but the oldest record I found in the town clerk's vault was a proposal for establishing a plantation on land "bequeathed . . . by Joshua Sachem sonne of Uncas," dated February 17, 1682.

The town has done a pretty good job of conserving its records. The 17th- and 18th-century vital records and town meeting minutes are enclosed in plastic sheets and bound into sturdy, red leather volumes. The bindings are a bit too tight, so the records don't lie flat when the pages are turned, but the plastic sheets are thick and hardy, so I don't think there's too much danger to the original records.

I found some good information about the burying ground, which was officially established in 1707. I haven't read through all of the 18th-century town meeting minutes yet, but I can always go back next time I'm in town.

While I was there, I also peeked at the vital records books. Page 173 of the ledger records the births, deaths, and marriages of some of Windham's enslaved residents (Job Hale, his wife Blosom, their children, Patience and Phineas; Hager and her daughter Dinah; Jenne and her daughter, Tamer):

In the 1850s, someone went through the old ledgers and compiled an alphabetical index for all of the vital records. This index became part of the Barbour Collection at the Connecticut State Library, but has not been digitized.

I've been forming a plan to see if I can get some Windham High students to work on a digitization project if I can wrangle some deal with the school to give them credit. It isn't hard work — the handwriting in the 19th-century index is beautiful and clear, so they wouldn't have to deal with the original records directly (though not all of the info from the originals made it into the index — for example, Jobe Hale and his family are listed, but their designation as "negro servants" is not). Then, we could scan the originals and make them accessible online. These records are not central to my dissertation in a way that would allow me to devote 6 months to working on them, but I could certainly direct the production of an online archive.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

While we may not hold athletes to the high of standards we hold politicians, we clearly hold them to higher standards than musicians . . . For our distant ancestors, athletic skill was much closer to political power. Small forager bands feared that the few most physically powerful members would attempt to dominate the band by force. Foragers had much less reason to fear domination by the few most musical folks in the band. So it made sense for foragers to hold athletes to higher moral standards than musicians.
So I suspect our tendency to hold athletes to higher standards than musicians is a holdover from our forager days . . .

Well, my job just got a lot easier. Why bother with 10,000 years of history when we can just explain the nuanced peculiarities of modern American culture in paleolithic terms? Robin Hanson is probably right — 21st-century Americans' expectations for athletes and musicians most likely have more to do with the politics of "small forager bands" than with the 1960s.

I think the United States has a bicameral legislature because hunter-gatherers recognized a hierarchy of earth and sky. This belief in two realms of influence — the "upper" and "lower" spheres of power — is reflected in the structure of our legislative branch.

This stone was carved by Obadiah Wheeler. I generally find his carvings charming and expressive — that poor little soul effigy looks rather nervous perched atop those scary, staring eyes. But then there's a little heart to soften the whole thing.

Friday, June 11, 2010

The Army has completed its inquiry into the mishandling of remains at Arlington National Cemetery. Investigators have found two cases in which recent veterans' graves have been mismarked and 209 other cases of unclear records, mismarked graves, or misplaced remains from other historical periods (no word on whether that means Vietnam-era or Civil War-era — probably a mixture).

I'm glad that Arlington has conducted a review of their records and procedures and it sounds like they will be making some improvements to their record-keeping to guard against future errors. I hope that Army officials are being open, honest, an apologetic with the families involved in these cases. Soldiers' loved ones have been through enough and they deserve to be treated with respect.

I find this story fascinating because it confirms for me the extreme expectations of Americans regarding the treatment of the dead. Not only do we want our dead to be buried in fixed, marked locations, we expect those locations to endure eternally. This is a peculiarly modern and (as I hope to argue in my dissertation) a somewhat American-specific concern. Our impulse in these matters seems to be toward preservation and archiving — we are very uncomfortable with the concepts of decay, silence, and oblivion.

I don't mean to minimize the failures of management at Arlington. The two recent cases of mismarking are especially disappointing. Still, the Arlington records (as they are described in the CNN article) seem remarkably accurate by cemetery standards. Over 330,000 people have been buried at Arlington in the past 150 years and, having visited many cemeteries in the course of my research, I find it amazing that the investigators were only able to turn up 211 cases of discrepancies between the records and the reality. I don't think any other 19th-century cemetery would survive a similar inquiry with fewer errors.

Of course, any inconsistencies at Arlington are troubling because they seem like just one more way in which the Army fails to provide the highest standard of care for American soldiers. If you expect that a cemetery will preserve and mark the remains of individuals for all time, any failure to do so reads as an insult to the dead. I just wonder why Americans have those expectations in the first place.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Like many Americans, I find the news that the Taliban has executed a seven-year-old boy to be deeply sickening. Reaction from world leaders has been fairly predictable — those who have commented on the case use it as an example of the unfathomable cruelty and depravity of the Taliban:

Afghan president Hamid Karzai:

"hanging or shooting to kill a 7-year-old boy . . . is a crime against humanity"

British Prime Minister David Cameron:

"If this is true, it is an absolutely horrific crime . . . If true, I think it says more about the Taliban than any book, than any article, than any speech could ever say."

When I read this story, I immediately thought back to Justice Thomas' recent dissent in Graham v. Florida, in which he argued that the Eighth Amendment should be understood to prohibit "methods [of punishment] akin to those that had been considered cruel and unusual at the time the Bill of Rights was adopted." In a footnote to that dissent, Justice Thomas argued that the Founding Fathers would not have considered sentencing a juvenile offender to life in prison without parole "cruel and unusual" because the common law "theoretically permitted [even] capital punishment to be imposed on a person as young as age 7,” reasoning that "It thus seems exceedingly unlikely that the imposition of a life-without-parole sentence on a person of Graham’s age would run afoul of those standards."

This is one of my all-time favorite gravestones. It is an excellent example of the kind of gravestone that free African Americans commissioned for themselves in the first decades after emancipation. Patience Borden's gravestone highlights her spiritual, financial, and charitable accomplishments (rather than her dependence) and allows her to claim sovereignty over her name.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

This past semester, I was a tutor for the required methodology course in the history department. My students were all sophomores and juniors hoping to concentrate in history (pending their ability to pass this course, which, happily, they all did).

Over the course of the semester, one of the main topics of discussion in section was the responsible use of sources. They all wrote papers based on a common collection of primary sources, then read and reviewed each others' work, so we had ample opportunity to see how different people used the same sources to support completely different (and often contradictory) arguments. For the most part, these arguments were reasonable and faithful to the sources.

Several students had some difficulty accepting the idea that the same sources could be interpreted in such diverse ways. They wanted to know what happened, not what some historian decided had happened, and it was my job to break the bad news to them that histories are the stories we tell ourselves about the past, not revelations. Two students found this particularly hard to take and found themselves standing on the brink of a sort of nihilistic postmodernism — you can make up anything and call it history!

Of course, I did my best to talk them back from the edge of despair, pointing out that this was the whole point of basing arguments on primary evidence. It's true that you can make sources say pretty much anything, but it is the historian's responsibility to interpret the sources in a way that represents them faithfully and makes a brave attempt to arrive at some sort of good-faith understanding about the past.

One of the tools I used during discussion was this spoof trailer for Shining, a feel-good family movie about "a writer looking for inspiration" and "a kid looking for a dad." I think it helped clarify what I was trying to say about the malleability of sources and the importance of responsible quotation:

This stone was carved by Bildad Washburn (1762-1832). James Blachowicz includes a long description of Washburn's extensive carving practice in From Slate to Marble (pgs.227-237). According to Blachowicz, this depiction of Rev. Angier in his pulpit is one of only two portrait stones by Washburn. It is unusual among portrait stones because it embeds the portrait in a real-world landscape. Only a few portrait stones embellish the setting in this way.

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